Health Care Deeming as Political Adultery

Let’s imagine a woman who is getting pressure from some obnoxious sleazeball stud to cheat on her husband and commit adultery. She’s tempted but, if caught, wants some excuse with which to placate her outraged husband so she can avoid a divorce. “Honest, honey, I didn’t consent!” And let’s imagine that the sleazeball wants to protect himself from a rape charge and probable beating by the husband.

So how could they do their deed and both cover their butts?

Perhaps, after sexy chit-chat over a few drinks in a bar, she says, “I’m really reluctant to do this.” But they agree to go up to his place, ostensibly so she can help him hang his etchings or for some other lame-ass excuse that both know to be a lie. And she pretty much lets him have his way with her.

If later the husband finds out, she plays her “I told him ‘No!’ sort of” card. “I only agreed to drinks and to help decorate his walls!” When the husband sends the cops to haul the sleazeball off to jail, he argues that he “deemed” that she had consented and that what he did was perfectly legal. After all, he explains, she had the drinks with him and went up to his room to see his artwork, and they were just creating a fiction with which she might placate her husband. Of course, the two stories contradict one another. The police would probably rule this to be a case of adultery rather than rape and the slutty wife would face a divorce.

This is the scenario faced by Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Political sluts?

Some members are reluctant to give in to the pressure from their sleazy leadership to support an abomination of a health care bill that they, the members, know will visit ill on the American people. Even more important to them since they are politicians, these members know that if they give in, their outraged constituents will give them a beating and divorce at the polls. These members want to be able to say, “Honest, honey, I didn’t consent to that bill! I only voted to improve it.”

The leadership wants these members to vote for amendments to the Senate bill and “deem” that because they’re voting on the amendments, that the Senate bill has been passed.  This approach would give reluctant members some political cover and it would spare the House Democratic leadership the necessity of first securing the votes for a bill that so many House Democrats don’t want to support and then fighting political battles over amendments for the bill. Do you follow this?

This tortuous approach is being concocted right before the eyes of outraged voters. Are the reluctant Democratic House members so deluded that they believe their constituents will play their part in this charade? Do they believe voters will say to these members, “Yes, we understand that you really didn’t support that terrible bill,” while saying to the leadership, “Yes, we understand that in voting to amend the bill, you deemed it to be passed and you made it the law of the land”?

Blank out

The moral failing of the adulterers and the Democrats, among others, comes from attempts to be dishonest, to fake reality. But in the case of the Democrats they are relying on others to play along with them, to do what no cuckolded spouse would put up with. This should come as no surprise since the Democrats have been equally dishonest about the substance and effects of Obamacare all along.

If Obamacare grants 30 million individuals essentially free access to new health care entitlements at a time of doctor shortages and at a time when 45 percent of doctors say they’d consider quitting if Obamacare passes, how will the 30 million new patients be treated? Blank out.



If Obamacare takes a half-trillion dollars out of cash-strapped Medicare to pay for the new entitlements, how will the government be able to avoid making severe cuts in Medicare? Blank out.

Watch the face of President Obama at the health care roundtable discussion with Republicans when Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan calmly, coolly, and rationally confronts him with the ugly reality of his proposals. Watch how the president keeps his face blank as he tries not to reveal the emotion of anger at being caught as Ryan slaps him in the face with fact after uncomfortable fact.

Moral meaning

More and more Americans now understand the dishonesty of the substance of Obamacare.  More and more Americans understand that Democrats who vote for the “deeming” approach are simply trying to cover their butts, to say “I didn’t like Obamacare either” even as their votes make Obamacare law. More and more Americans understand what they can expect from a health care system created and overseen by those who can achieve their policy goals only by refusing to look at the consequences of such policies and by hiding the consequences from the public.

Let’s hope that more and more Americans will understand the moral meaning of the whole Obamacare episode: that they are committing moral treason to themselves by rejecting responsibility for their own lives and turning their lives over to dishonest politicians to run for them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Edward Hudgins

Edward Hudgins is research director at the Heartland Institute and former director of advocacy and senior scholar at The Atlas Society.

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